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Why Apple's Tim Cook is an important CEO

indiatimes | Posted By : Ritik Ahuja|1 year ago |464 Views

The importance of Tim Cook lies not just in his being the CEO of the worldâ€™s most valuable company. He is also a pioneering activist CEO who believes business leaders need to engage in larger societal issues

By Dibeyendu Ganguly

At Apple's annual general meeting two years ago, a shareholder harangued CEO Tim Cook for wasting the company's resources on environmental initiatives that contributed nothing to the bottom line.

A flustered Cook had countered the attack by saying, "We do a lot of things for reasons besides the profit motive." Then he got tough. If investors had a problem with it, he said, they should go ahead and divest their stock.

Some consider it a turning point in Cook's business leadership. A few months later, he came out as a gay.

The importance of Tim Cook lies not just in his being the CEO of the world's most valuable company. He is also a pioneering activist CEO who believes business leaders need to engage in larger societal issues.

More specifically, in an era where gay men and women have been given the right to marry, Cook is an icon to millions of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) people, especially those in the business world, where coming out is often the hardest.

Insiders knew that Cook was gay long before he publicly confirmed it. But the prevailing wisdom was, 'Don't ask, don't tell'.

John Browne, former CEO of British Petroleum (BP), was a man in a similar predicament. After his rather inglorious exit from BP, Browne explained why he chose to keep his sexuality a secret throughout his career, saying he met presidents and prime ministers wherever he went and it would have been awkward if they knew he was gay.

Besides, BP was present in conservative countries where homosexuality is a criminal offence and he did not want to jeopardise these operations. These were the specious rationalisations gay businesspeople lived by in the past.

Cook started something wholly new when he authored a piece titled, 'I'm Proud to be Gay', in Bloomberg Businessweek (goo.gl/yk5k Jb), where he said his desire for privacy had been holding him back from doing something important. Cook has lived up to that promise.

A Closet with Glass Doors

For example, he recently came out strongly against a piece of legislation in the US state of Indiana, which gave business-owners the right to discriminate against LGBT people for religious reasons. Indiana's governor Mike Pence eventually amended the Bill and removed the offending clauses.

Other American states that were on the verge of passing similar laws have since had to think again. A research study on 'outspoken CEOs' by Aaron K Chatterji of Duke University and Michael W Toffel of Harvard Business School ('Do CEO Activists Make a Difference? Evidence from a Field Experiment', goo. gl/WH0JAi) finds that Cook's activism has gone down well with the American public and has actually helped the Apple brand.

He has put off some hard-core conservatives, but the gains far outweigh the losses. It's obviously the right time for business leaders to take a stand on LGBT rights and CEOs of Unilever, Intel, salesforce.com, Starbucks and Goldman Sachs have joined Cook in speaking out.

Will Cook choose to extend his influence outside American borders? More importantly, can the CEO of Apple make a tangible difference to the LGBT movement around the world? Some wish we could just import social progress into the country, like the bullet train from Japan.

Go in a few short steps from outlawing homosexuality through Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, to legalising gay marriage - much as our banks leapfrogged to the latest information technology without having to deal with legacy systems.

That would be wishful thinking. On his very first visit to India this week, it is unlikely that Cook will raise the subject of LGBT rights with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Cabinet ministers, chief ministers or the business leaders he is scheduled to meet. Even if he did, it won't necessarily accelerate the process of changing the laws and decriminalising homosexuality in India. These things will take their time.

However, Cook's five-day visit still counts for a lot. Executive assistants preparing dossiers on him ahead of meetings with their bosses will include the fact that he is gay. The bosses will raise an eyebrow. They may pass a vacuous remark. But they will take note.

For some, Cook may be the very first openly gay man they have ever met. Some of them may take the initiative and broach the subject on their own. One never knows.

Happy and Gay

It's been a hectic summer for India's LGBT community. Bollywood has released no less than three gay-themed films in the last two months: Dear Dad, Aligarh, Kapoor and Sons. Hollywood actress Ellen Page, who came out as lesbian recently, was in Mumbai making a documentary. Next week, gay actor Ian McKellen is arriving in Mumbai to inaugurate a fiveday LGBT film festival.

All this may seem a paradox to Americans. So much LGBT activity in a country where homosexual acts are deemed illegal? That's India for you. In the US, laws mandate cultural change. But here it's the other way round.